Some suggestions for improvements for the next versions -4.5 ?
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Thank to the Devs for all the fine work to date. Here’s a couple suggestions that might be a nice project for somebody.
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The A-10 Warthog Cockpit
Would love to see more work go into the cockpit for this jet, especially if it were possible to simulate the twin throttle for those of us who own TM Warthog HOTAS, that would be amazing. A decent ramp start sequence would be a welcome addition. -
AV-8B Harrier Cockpit
If it were possible to have the nozzles mapped to the friction control slider on the TM Warthog HOTAS that would be a great asset and make it more realistic. The glitches that seem to bounce the Harrier around on deck (or tarmac) sound like the flaps are making adjustments constantly. -
The F-14 Tom Cat Cockpit
This would become a very popular flight model if more work was put into the cockpit controls. At the moment they are pretty much non existent.
I would rather see more work on this than worrying about weather or terrain graphics, but this my opinion and in no way a criticism of the great work the devs do for the BMS community.
Fantastic job chaps! Please keep up the great work!.
Kavelenko.
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@gusva said in Some suggestions for improvements for the next versions -4.5 ?:
@xeno or consider your answer to Saifer here as well.
My question about using the most of the new features of this RTX line cards, for example, goes against this lighting feature that “blinds” the screen by the excess light when the sun is at your back.
Thanks for the clarification on DX11, good to know how the script for features like DX12 / Vulkan is doing.
About the shadings I have a slightly different opinion from yours, these are details that added up greatly improve the combat experience, yes the shadings require resources from the video cards, but currently we have cards with more than twice the resources of those that were top-of-the-line in the graphical version of the BMS in its latest version. Just as lighting on panels degrades visibility, shadows on buildings, trees or clouds are very important.
The Idea is rather to make a Braimstorm so that we can have a wish list that in the near future can be implemented or discussed.
In fact, we have a lot to thank these heroes who develop and we’ve already reached a very high level in the BMS.
This post is not a critique it is a wish that always takes this great project to one level.
Hi, FYI feature-wise DX12 is almost exactly same as DX11. The main advantage of DX12/Vulkan over DX11 is that they allow parallel access to the DirectX context, means you can generate more draw calls from many threads. However… and that is a VERY important point for this discussion: If your GPU is already breathing hard and utilized ~100% capacity, then common sense makes me believe it won’t gain much from launching more draw calls from other threads. I think DX12/Vulkan would be much more effective for an app that doesn’t utilize the GPU 100% all the time. I can tell you that with “future” BMS stuff that isn’t the situation, GPU is 100% utilized ALL THE TIME with DX11. I think that the gain from DX12/Vulkan in this case will be minimal.
That said, of course DX12/Vulkan have some nice features above DX11 - For example if there is 1 thing I’ll REALLY like to have is to be able to mix different texture resolutions in a single texture-array, unfortunately that isn’t possible with DX11. Also maybe Tiled-resources could be of use if we had that (Available with DX11.3 but we can’t go there as it forces Win10 and for now we are against that).
Talks about ray tracing are nice, but some of those implementations are really sophisticated and not easy to achieve and yet will cost a lot in terms of performance. A flight sim is always more demanding compared to FPS games, and having ray-tracing running everywhere will be too much of a performance hit, even for very strong GPUs. We in BMS when developing stuff think about both beauty/quality but also about keeping sane performance, because a combat flight sim cannot be used if performance is marginal all the time.
Nice pic there with the cumulus shadows. I believe however that there are more urgent features to implement and achieve before going for such “niche” stuff. BTW I don’t think it would be such a big deal to generate such shadow map and use it on everything, will see, but there are bigger concerns with higher priority, maybe sometime later
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Would the possibility of having a re-arming feature in any of the alternative or main operating bases too far fetch?
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@lmr-74 Sorry but that will never happen for the simple reason that it takes time to reload an aircraft and the best would be to refrag a flight…
We are not DCS…
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@lmr-74 Re-arming is actually not an easy process, it needs winches to lift 1 ton bombs, it needs several people for a long time to put 2 pairs of Mk84 plus two tanks cost can take more than an hour or two. In addition to making several checklists for aircraft delivery, rearmament and readiness for the next flight.
Anything like that doesn’t make sense in the BMS, it’s not a race car pitstop.
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@kavelenko I don’t see this as a priority, since the BMS is an F-16 simulator, it has all the systems geared towards that end. Each such aircraft would need to implement each system on each aircraft.
I’m putting some desirable points to be improved on the F-16 alone.
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Thanks for the explanation, I didn’t have this knowledge about DX11 and DX12 features, I agree with the folks above that they should focus on fully implementing DX11.
The question about shadows I will disagree with you a bit and yes I should put it as an additional feature with the option to be disabled for those who do not have a proper GPU. Details are important for every BMS enhancement.
About Raytracing, RTX boards are here to stay and soon they should enter the Roadmap
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@gusva said in Some suggestions for improvements for the next versions -4.5 ?:
I can see that you are part of the high level team at the BMS. A suggestion that I had put a while ago is in the lower topic, is there a way to improve the ecm panel without bumping into the classifield and not getting so arcade?
It’s actually happening
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Hello everyone, continuing with the ideas for future versions of the simulator, something that I would like you to add is the possibility of communicating and using ground troops such as the JTAC and the like.
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@trueno said in Some suggestions for improvements for the next versions -4.5 ?:
Hello everyone, continuing with the ideas for future versions of the simulator, something that I would like you to add is the possibility of communicating and using ground troops such as the JTAC and the like.
We thought about it as well
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@trueno said in Some suggestions for improvements for the next versions -4.5 ?:
Hello everyone, continuing with the ideas for future versions of the simulator, something that I would like you to add is the possibility of communicating and using ground troops such as the JTAC and the like.
or be a SAM operator is adream coming true.
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My 2 Cents:
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Have landing and taxi light (not the actual beam of light that is already happening) to be independent (this is modeling switch designation related )
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Include the programming so that we can control flaps in AFM airplanes just like OFM airplanes at the moment.
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As already mentioned a major overall in the graphics of the clouds (the weather system is very good as it is)
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Not sure if Dev. related but we need a major rework on the add on for 3DS Max and upgraded it so we work in earlier version of the software.
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If possible make 128 segment theaters to see threat circles in the 2D world.
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@i-hawk said in Some suggestions for improvements for the next versions -4.5 ?:
allow parallel access to the DirectX context, means you can generate more draw calls from many threads
It always amazes me to see 3D games make thousands of draw() calls every 10ms. (But somehow my system takes several minutes just to boot, log in and render my 2D desktop… lol)
I think the original F4 codebase pre-dated the first dual core Pentiums by … several years? hard to remember. So it’s an amazing thing that BMS makes use of more than 1 core at all.
Did U3 make any further changes to the overall threading model? I haven’t spent any time in the debugger or profiler since U3 so I’m not sure. :] (huge grin)
Generating frames smoothly and consistently is more important, to me, than shaving off milliseconds for higher fps throughput. U3 seems better than ever, in that regard, but I still get periodic microstutters.
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@airtex2019 said in Some suggestions for improvements for the next versions -4.5 ?:
@i-hawk said in Some suggestions for improvements for the next versions -4.5 ?:
allow parallel access to the DirectX context, means you can generate more draw calls from many threads
It always amazes me to see 3D games make thousands of draw() calls every 10ms. (But somehow my system takes several minutes just to boot, log in and render my 2D desktop… lol)
LOL
I think the original F4 codebase pre-dated the first dual core Pentiums by … several years? hard to remember. So it’s an amazing thing that BMS makes use of more than 1 core at all.
Yes it is quite amazing thinking of that, I heard from folks who were there when the whole things was designed that the mindset was to “Multi thread as much as you can”. No idea why when you have only 1 core to work with. However, I think it would have been easier to multi-thread today than to now fix the original design which unfortunately include (too many) locks in order to run stable. Fortunately, we have today lots of CPU margin to play with so once we will find ways to untangle some of the stuff, we could probably use the existing HW to do more.
However, things are changing internally, and the sim in our Dev branch is pretty different than the public version, while more advanced in some graphical areas, it also change the relations between CPU/GPU loads, so things that today are considered a must to improve, been changed to a degree that they won’t matter much anymore… I personally was amazed to find out (Not me, but Seifer told me cause he knows ) that our code spends most of our CPU load on… transforming vertices. All these years I was quite sure that we spend most of CPU on sim logic right? NO! it’s even a 80-20 kind of relations as far as I understand
Did U3 make any further changes to the overall threading model? I haven’t spent any time in the debugger or profiler since U3 so I’m not sure. :] (huge grin)
I’m not totally sure as I’m personally hardly involved with U3, Seifer can for sure answer that. If you see a performance boost as I understand, it could be some other optimizations than parallel code. Seifer did quite some amazing work there: Both on stability and performance optimizations. And I’m talking about REAL tough crap like nasty races and deadlocks in the most complicated areas of the sim. Not trivial at all
Generating frames smoothly and consistently is more important, to me, than shaving off milliseconds for higher fps throughput. U3 seems better than ever, in that regard, but I still get periodic microstutters.
Wondering where those micro stutters are coming from. I usually have a good eye for performance drops or stuff like stutters, but since a couple of years now that I don’t fly “officially” and I’m with my head deep into future versions, I don’t really follow the current experience. But many other do fly (Including Seifer BTW) and I think if there were constant micro-stutters, we would get such reports from multiple areas. I remember your detailed report and so I believe that maybe you have a very sensitive eye and you caught something that others do not really feel. It would be interesting to track that stuff, as always in Falcon code, there is something lurking from the past
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@i-hawk said in Some suggestions for improvements for the next versions -4.5 ?:
very sensitive eye and you caught something that others do not really feel
Ironically I see it more in others’ youtube videos … as I’ve tried so hard to optimize my own settings to avoid it, or mitigate it.
Talking about a ~7ms hiccup in frame timings, once every 80-90 frames. I can’t think of how I would begin to debug that, even if I had source code. (I suppose I would instrument the SimLoop and render-thread code to log detailed timing data, and look for discrepancies between p90 and p99 timings.)
I remember from looking at profiler samples, earlier (U1 or U2) my best guess was Weather / sky / lighting code, periodically loading new textures? But that’s a complete WAG…
Anyway, food for thought for the future-dev-branch… if this aspect of the engine is being redesigned or refactored – try to avoid doing anything blocking, irregular or nondeterministic, on the main SimLoop or render threads. (Easier said than done, I know I know)
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1 - Global World
100% unnecessary and it would just totally big and complicated the game.
And BMS is not FS2020… -
@seifer Ray Tracing would be the most useless thing in the sim.
- As for environment it is simply overkill it does not needed…
- In the cockpit I can imagine the load on any VGA at night where n+1 light sources and reflection in cockpit glass and these sources also have reflection surfaces…
IHMO the merits of a HC flight combat sim is not like that…
To me always the level of tactical environment be the no.1 point and everything comes just after.
So can we have nicer clouds? OK, but in this case the function of the cloud has to modeled block the IR and EO tracking as already happened.
The GFX imp. alone is 100% pointless.
I’m bored on games which are quite photoreal and simply looks very nice…
…while the AI sees through fog, dust and clouds… etc. -
@airtex2019 said in Some suggestions for improvements for the next versions -4.5 ?:
@i-hawk said in Some suggestions for improvements for the next versions -4.5 ?:
very sensitive eye and you caught something that others do not really feel
Ironically I see it more in others’ youtube videos … as I’ve tried so hard to optimize my own settings to avoid it, or mitigate it.
Talking about a ~7ms hiccup in frame timings, once every 80-90 frames. I can’t think of how I would begin to debug that, even if I had source code. (I suppose I would instrument the SimLoop and render-thread code to log detailed timing data, and look for discrepancies between p90 and p99 timings.)
I remember from looking at profiler samples, earlier (U1 or U2) my best guess was Weather / sky / lighting code, periodically loading new textures? But that’s a complete WAG…
Anyway, food for thought for the future-dev-branch… if this aspect of the engine is being redesigned or refactored – try to avoid doing anything blocking, irregular or nondeterministic, on the main SimLoop or render threads. (Easier said than done, I know I know)
If I do the math right, a 7ms stutter every 80-90 frames is I assume ~every second for an average flight with decent system, that sounds like a LOT and I think there is 0 chances no one in or outside the team would notice such an anomaly.
I seriously doubt about loading new weather related textures every ~90 frames.
It’ll be interesting to find the root cause but I guess first we need someone in the Dev team to be able to repro it
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@molnibalage said in Some suggestions for improvements for the next versions -4.5 ?:
1 - Global World
100% unnecessary and it would just totally big and complicated the game.
And BMS is not FS2020…Probably will not happen. We have so much to do before we even dream of such a thing, that I think I’ll be deaf and senile before that will happen to Falcon4 :d